What Is A Scientist, A True Scientist?

This question about scientists arises whenever there are people hoping to claim that science and religion can be compatible. Most such commentators get the matter entirely wrong.

Obviously to start with, a minimum requirement is that for somebody to be considered as even a candidate to be a scientist he or she must have had adequate scientific training OR scientific experience to a suitably high level maintained for a number of years. For some candidates, it can be enough to start with a good undergraduate degree in a science—and yet this may not be enough. It all depends . . .

What is crucial is that if an otherwise qualified candidate is to be counted among true scientists, then he or she must necessarily respect all the cherished interdisciplinary, self-supporting, cross-authenticating, experimental and theoretical work done by the rest of the world’s scientists in the last century and more.

Among these are the biologists, physicists, chemists, geologists, cosmologists, astronomers, high-energy physicists, and so many others who have contributed to the discoveries of evolution and the origins of life, mankind, Earth and the Universe.

Anyone who might try denying the strength of what amounts to millions of experiments by millions of scientists, and instead seeks to bring the influence of some god into it, can NEVER be called a genuine scientist because his or her mind is afflicted by the inadmissible holding of some kind of anti-scientific faith or belief.

A true scientist is one who seeks the truth and follows the evidence wherever it leads and accepts the resulting facts. Nothing is faked, nothing is forced. Therefore rationality ultimately reigns. Unlike god-believers, rationalists never twist facts, whereas god-supporters ignore facts they do not like and attempt to smuggle in crazy notions about divinities.

In short, gods exist only insofar as they are constructs of the human mind—like fairy-tales and other fictions—and languish nowhere else but as neuron-based ephemera or illusions in the heads of deluded believers.

If somebody claiming to be a scientist does not accept that, then he or she is definitely not a 100% true scientist because a genuine, sincere scientist never refuses to accept the corroborated facts and laws uncovered by other scientists who are experts in their own fields of dependable, repeatable, verifiable research.